NASA Fights Back On Moon Landing

From: Mike Cahill <cfans.nul>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 16:41:47 -0600
Archived: Sun, 03 Nov 2002 10:22:03 -0400
Subject: NASA Fights Back On Moon Landing
I generally turn the page when I see this stuff, but the
following is the text of the post Oberg put out on
alt.conspiracy announcing this whole exercise. Not my first
choice of venue.
Cheers,
Mike Cahill
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Oberg" <jamesoberg.nul>
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,sci.space.history
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 11:20 AM
Subject: NASA fighting back to confirm that U.S. really flew to moon
NASA fighting back to confirm that U.S. really flew to moon BY
SETH BORENSTEIN, Knight Ridder News Service // October 30, 2002
sborenstein.nul
WASHINGTON - More than 33 years after the United States landed
men on the moon, NASA is spending more than $15,000 to convince
people that it really did happen and that the space agency
didn't make it all up.
Stubborn conspiracy theorists claim that NASA's six Apollo-
program moon landings were faked. After decades of belittling
and ignoring them, NASA has decided to fight back. It hired
James Oberg, a Houston-based former aerospace engineer and
award-winning author of 10 books on space, to confront skeptics
point by point. Many scientists already have done that on the
Internet, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
"Ignoring it only fans the flames of people who are naturally
suspicious," Oberg said Tuesday in an interview.
Last year, Fox television twice broadcast a show entitled
Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?, and NBC's
Today show staged a debate on the topic. Last month, Buzz
Aldrin, the second man on the moon, punched a conspiracy
theorist who had been pestering him to swear on a stack of
Bibles that the landing was real.
After the Fox show first aired, NASA put out a one-paragraph
press release titled Apollo: Yes, We Did.
Yet a 1999 poll found that 11 percent of the American public
doubted the moon landing happened, and Fox officials said such
skepticism increased to about 20 percent after their show, which
was seen by about 15 million viewers.
Stephen Garber, NASA's acting chief historian, said Oberg's 10-
chapter, 30,000-word monograph 'is not going to convince the
people who believe in these myths. Hopefully, it'll speak to
other people who are broad-minded."
The book will expose "space myths writ large [and will] look at
some of these broader issues of how these myths get initiated
and promulgated," Garber said.
Oberg "has got one hell of a job ahead of him," said skeptic
Ralph Rene, a New Jersey carpenter who said he is self-taught in
physics and has self-published two books. One book claims the
moon landing didn't happen; the other criticizes Isaac Newton's
grasp of physics. 'I could care less what they do."
"It's a real shame that it has to be done," said Sonoma State
University astronomy Professor Phil Plait. He runs the
badastronomy.com website, which debunks space myths, including
the moon-hoax theory.
"It's beneath NASA's dignity to give these twinkies the time of
day," Plait said. 'The problem is, if you ignore a problem, it
doesn't go away.'"
But confronting conspiracy theorists usually doesn't convince
them either, said historian Gregory Camp, author of Selling
Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia. "The true
believers in that kind of thing already have the answers - at
least in their eyes," Camp said.
"It's incredible that a book like that has to be written," he
said.
------
Oberg can be reached at joberg.nul